通过最优分布调节实现精准公平,消除模型偏见与性能的权衡。
On Optimal Steering to Achieve Exact Fairness
- 定义理想分布:任何代价敏感风险最小化都可保证完全公平
- 基于KL散度寻找最近理想分布,提出高效算法适用于正态等常见分布
- 在真实数据和大模型表示上验证,提升公平性且不损失甚至提升性能
为解决公平机器学习中‘输入偏见导致输出偏见’的问题,需将数据特征分布或大语言模型(LLM)内部表示调节至能保证群体公平结果的理想分布。我们定义一种分布为理想分布,若在其上任意代价敏感风险的最小化均能保证精确的群体公平性(如人口均等、机会均等),即不存在公平性与效用之间的权衡。为此,我们构建一个以KL散度最小化为目标的优化程序,用于寻找最接近理想分布的分布,并针对正态、对数正态等常见参数族提供高效算法。在合成数据和真实世界数据集上的实验证明,该方法在不降低效用甚至提升效用的前提下显著改善公平性。我们在Bios数据集上展示了对LLM表示进行仿射调节以减少多分类任务中的偏见,例如从个人简介预测职业;同时,通过调节大模型内部表示,使其在不同群体间表现一致。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
To fix the 'bias in, bias out' problem in fair machine learning, it is important to steer feature distributions of data or internal representations of Large Language Models (LLMs) to ideal ones that guarantee group-fair outcomes. Previous work on fair generative models and representation steering could greatly benefit from provable fairness guarantees on the model output. We define a distribution as ideal if the minimizer of any cost-sensitive risk on it is guaranteed to have exact group-fair outcomes (e.g., demographic parity, equal opportunity)-in other words, it has no fairness-utility trade-off. We formulate an optimization program for optimal steering by finding the nearest ideal distribution in KL-divergence, and provide efficient algorithms for it when the underlying distributions come from well-known parametric families (e.g., normal, log-normal). Empirically, our optimal steering techniques on both synthetic and real-world datasets improve fairness without diminishing utility (and sometimes even improve utility). We demonstrate affine steering of LLM representations to reduce bias in multi-class classification, e.g., occupation prediction from a short biography in Bios dataset (De-Arteaga et al.). Furthermore, we steer internal representations of LLMs towards desired outputs so that it works equally well across different groups.
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